Is it worth switching to Simplify3D? I recently got some money from printing things from people, and I can afford to get Simplify3D. Is it worth the money? Right now, I am using Sli3r Prusa Edition with a custom profile for my machine. I do printing quite frequently, and often for others for profit.
Once you get simplify you wont regret and never go back, i was using sli3er last year and is literally a completly new world, my advice go for it
I’ve enjoyed it a good bit. The custom support placement has come in handy many times.
I bought Simplify3D a while back and have loved it. But in that time other slicers have progressed more rapidly and things have changed a bit. I’d recommend trying the newest version of Cura before going to S3D, it has a lot of new features and the new mesh settings could be used similarly to S3D’s custom supports. The biggest selling point S3D has going for it is the multiple processes feature which is definitely a tool I’ve needed for specific prints but I don’t use extremely often.
S3D is really nice if you have a lot of different printers… for example, it can output Makerbot print files (Sailfish x3g and 5th gen json) and lots of other formats as well as standard gcode. Lets you use one slicer to do everything.
That’s not so much an issue if you only have one printer, or only have printers with identical gcode flavors.
I tried using Cura and even after a lot of tuning, my print quality was frankly just terrible for some reason.
@Sahil_Jain dont expect prints to improve with s3d … in some cases ( small perimeters ) it is even worse… it is just the multiple processes and the support feature are the selling point. AND also s3d works great even on ancient laptops unlike the other slicrs which are a bit of a hoard on resources.
@Sahil_Jain it’s possible to get great results with Cura or any other major slicer, I wouldn’t blame the software. The performance differences between them are honestly pretty small stuff on the margins, like how particular kinds of thin wall geometry are handled. Usually when you get entirely different results with different slicers, it’s because of different tuning requirements (particularly extrusion volume). The big differences between slicers are in UI, setup for new printers, and special features.
S3Ds biggest selling point for me was the insanely fast slicing, and when you’re working on 200mb files, it makes a difference.
I just got simplify3d last week end. It’s a little different from Cura and silcr. I was getting good results with Cura but even with tree supports or using meshmixer to make the supports then cut in Cura it was a lot of hit and miss. I print mostly minis for tabletop rpgs. The simplify3d supports are amazing. You have to double check and make sure the auto pass didn’t miss anything, but usual (90% of the time in my experience) it does it good. My prints are coming out a lot sharper and almost no failures yet. So yes it is worth it. The time you save is as valuable 
So I figured I’d come back to this post after spending 2 hours prepping files in Cura at work today. I had a lot of parts to print and only a few needed supports. S3D would have let me set supports per model or delete unneeded supports but a very basic feature I was hoping Cura had was “unsupported area threshold” which I could adjust to remove most of the small unnecessary supports. Cura does not have this setting and I had to go in and add support blockers to most of the models.